An Open Letter to Swim Gym Kids

What is UP, freshmen who failed the swim test? Freshmen who just got placed here? That one junior who’s taking swim gym for unknown reasons? You guys are busy and all—learning to swim, dunking on other kids while playing water polo, trying to rush to classes from the first floor, complaining about swim gym—I get it. Okay? I understand what’s going on with you guys. But I just have a simple request for you guys.

Which is STOP MAKING THE POOL LOCKER ROOMS SO GROSS.

Okay? Do you understand? Every day since the beginning of the school year, I have gone to the pool at the end of the day for swim practice. The practice is two hours long and in a freezing cold pool because the pool heater doesn’t want to get fixed, and now since it’s daylight savings or whatever, it’s getting dark at 5:00 p.m. so I never even get to see the sun. And you know what makes this experience even worse? The fact that you guys can’t even learn to pick up after yourselves after you get out of swim gym!

I can understand the pool locker rooms being really wet. Maybe I can even excuse the fact that there is a perpetual great flood in the locker rooms and that you need your personal Noah’s Ark to enter it at the end of the day. I can excuse that. I can’t excuse that you guys treat the place as some sort of black hole that can suck in all your germs and trash in the same way that Stuy has sucked out your hopes and dreams. Okay? Some kid left her underwear in the locker room one day. Why would you leave your underwear in the locker room? How do you leave your underwear in the locker room?

Weirder than the things you leave in the locker room are the things you take from the locker room. Apparently one of you guys took the bench from the guys’ pool locker room? Like, the one that was brought in because you broke the previous one? Why?

The worst part is the one of many ghosts that silently judge Stuy (seriously, why do we have so many of them? It’s like they all gravitate toward misery.) that constantly hangs out in the pool area. I can always feel her anger toward the sorry state of the locker rooms. This is your fault. It is your fault that she is experiencing eternal torment looking at the pool locker room floor.

Seriously, guys, get your act together. The swim teams don’t deserve to deal with your BS at the end of the day. We single-handedly carry all of Stuyvesant’s sports teams (don’t boo me, it’s true) and this should not be the thanks we get. We don’t deserve this kind of pool locker room with brand new species of mold that the Urban Ecology class is breaking down our doors to study.

Clean up after yourselves.